The Afterlife: A Memoir

by Donald Antrim

  The garment I often see, whenever I talk to my dead mother, is a silk kimono. Or it is not a kimono, exactly; it is a robe, hemmed short, that appears kimono-like. The body is white. The sleeves, too, are white, and are encircled with wide bands of machine-made ivory lace. There is a hint of Chanel in the thinner white bands that occur near the seams linking the sleeves to the body, and in the bunched-up lengths of silk crepe, one in aquamarine, another in a darker blue, and a third in indigo, which are wrapped, in a slightly militaristic style, around each shoulder, and held in place by narrow ribbons sewn like belt loops. These blue and indigo sashes descend from the loops, cascading down the sides of the kimono beneath the arms, and are weighted with horsehair tassels, twelve in all, shaped like angels.

  Suspended over each breast of the kimono, from threads attached to detachable shining stars, are two metallic birds like Christmas-tree ornaments. One tethered bird is yellow and in flight; its opposite is pink and at rest. Directly beneath these swinging birds is a green field of fabric in the shape of a valentine heart, half appearing on the kimono’s right side, half on the left. If the garment’s overall ground is the kimono’s white silk, then the ground atop that ground is the divided green heart, which can be made whole by closing the kimono at the front. The heart, which stands about ten inches in height, serves as the locus for a gathering of ostensibly reassuring visual elements. On one side, where, if this were a medical illustration, an atrial chamber might appear, a fuzzy white cat — a cat like the dandruffy white cat my mother then had — sits stitched in place. A giraffe peeks from behind the top of the other side, as if looking curiously over a green hill. The scene is pastoral, a nursery picture. In keeping with the theme of childhood innocence, more green fabric extends down and around the garment’s sides in the form of two winding, ever-narrowing pathways bordered with elaborately stitched flowers. I am unable to look at these flowers without remembering the poppy fields in The Wizard of Oz.

  There is more. Ribbons attached in the neighborhood of the green heart hang down below the robe’s bottom hem. At the ends of the ribbons are several found and custom-made objects: a piece of quartz, an empty pillbox, a charm made of metal and beads, a peacock feather, and a small pouch — a coin purse — knitted from brightly colored yarn. There are two lace sachets — of the frilly sort found in farmhouse bedroom dressers — filled with potpourri. Another ornament, made of felt and shaped like a banana, is, in fact, a yellow man in the moon, featuring a pointy nose, a broad mouth, and sleepy eyes.

  In order to see the real action taking place on this garment, however, one must carefully turn it over, lay it flat, and study the back.

  At the bottom, there is a section of dark-blue and white overshot — a traditional handwoven fabric used mainly for bedcovers — cut more or less in the shape of a pedestal. Flanking the pedestal are four decorative patches, two on each side, made from floral embroidered silks in black, gold, pink, bronze, silver, white, and blue. The patches are stitched on at angles. Are they meant to look like pockets? Are they badges? There’s something purposefully crazy about their off-kilter placement, as if they were intended to communicate the designer’s sense of spontaneity and play, her awareness of the life to be found in all things, even remnants of cloth. Directly above the dancing patches runs the continuation of the band of green fabric that began on the garment’s front as the flowered pathways branching off from the perimeter of the heart. On the robe’s back, this green strip is no longer bordered with flowers; it is hung with bronze and silver pendants — coins, seashells, and starfish. A lion and a horse, made from painted bamboo, descend from strings attached to the kimono’s mid-regions; they function together as toy sentinels guarding a complicated piece of Chinese fabric that looks, from a distance, a little like the head depicted in Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Instead of Munch’s wailing face, however, there can be found, at the center of this fabric, a waterbird — a golden crane with a black beak, dark eyes, and a red crest. Around this crane my mother has sewn a standard — a green organza horseshoe, held in place by loops of silver ribbon. The tail ends of the standard are tasseled — not with ornamental angels but with delicate white tassels, the kind appropriate, I would think, for a fringe on a lamp shade.

  One more feature needs description. This is an object that covers — as if it had flown in from mountainous lands where giant, benign creatures dwell; found itself over southern Florida; gazed down and seen, from high above the clouds, my mother at work in her shop; then descended and landed in her fields of silk, where it got comfortable and decided to stay — this object, as I was saying, covers the entire upper back of the kimono. It is an enormous, enormously winged, butterfly.

  The body of the butterfly is something my mother bought in a store. Its skin is paper, stretched over a lightweight wooden frame, and brightly painted. I suspect it may be an Indonesian export. It is three-dimensional and elongated — with a proper head, an abdomen, and a waspish tail — and is attached to the garment along the back seam, running head to tail down the wearer’s spine. Its outstretched wings, which are made of soft, quilted silk, reach to the kimono’s shoulders and are a dull white, painted with pastel swirls and stripes. With its outstretched wings — and as if in imitation of nature’s strategy of imitation — the creature looks like a kite. The wings reach to the kimono’s shoulders. As a crowning touch, the butterfly displays two delicate antennae that extend upward from its head. In photographs of the robe, these antennae are long and spiraling. Somewhere along the way, however, the antennae have been broken. They’re short, splintered.

  For more than ten years, my mother had run a program in fashion, textiles, and costume history at Miami — Dade Community College. She had a small faculty under her, and many students. Frequently, she was up and out of the house by sunrise. She might not return before evening. She slept little. Instead, she drank. My father was her partner in this. As evening turned to night, the two of them fought. As the night got late, she went after him with greater and greater fury. A woman had come between my parents in the early years of their marriage, and brought about their first divorce. After their remarriage, when I was nine and my sister, Terry, eight — and until their relationship ended for good — the memory of that woman haunted our family. Many times, following a bout of fighting, when my mother had tumbled into bed or lost consciousness in a chair, my father wept and apologized.

  “I’m sorry,” he would say to me and my sister, and the look on his face showed that he meant it. But though he did not intend to, and could not have known it, he was apologizing our mother out of existence. He was apologizing himself and his children out of existence, when he whispered to Terry and me, “Your mother works hard all day at school. She works so hard. She’s just tired. She’s tired.”

  “She’s not tired!” I shouted back. “She’s an alcoholic!” No one was listening. Who pays attention to an unhappy fifteen-year-old? And, after all, my mother wasn’t the only one who was tired. All our lives were given over to her. I once marveled that my father could endure my mother. I found his martyrdom, as I thought of it then, honorable. It seemed to me that our family was guided by a bleak, incomprehensible fate. It wasn’t incomprehensible, though, and it wasn’t fate that was guiding us. It was alcohol.

  After the nights came the mornings. My sister and I got out of our beds, put on clothes, and marched from the house to the corner where the school bus stopped. In this we took our mother’s lead, our mother who lit a morning cigarette, swallowed her coffee, and, without memory of herself in her darker form, went to the office. In those days, the early seventies, her work at the college did not figure much in our family’s daily life. It was not something that we talked about. It was never celebrated. She was alone in her work, and she was alone at home, and her isolation — from her family and from the world — informed her use of fashion and design to tell her life story.

  But there is a problem. Fashion — and I refer not only to clothes, stylish or otherwise, and the w
ays they evolve and are worn, but to the meanings and associations that can be drawn from stylistic variations or the lack of variations in clothes — fashion, whether or not considered a high art form, remains explicitly a visual and tactile language, a language, as I have come to understand from reading the work of the art historian Anne Hollander, written in an alphabet of colors, shapes, textures, and forms that subtly shift and change from season to season, and from year to year, over the decades of our lifetimes. Fashion is a communal dialogue, a conversation that never stops — on the subjects of desire, power, kinship, sex, and the passing of time — between people living together in a society. What happens to the conversation, though, when the primary society known by a maker of clothes consists of a dying family — a family which, night after night, year after year, apologizes itself out of existence?

  There was a week in the early nineties when my mother, driving her station wagon from Miami, and I, flying south from New York, met in Black Mountain, North Carolina, at the home of her parents. She’d brought with her a selection of her wearable creations, and she was eager to show them off. One night after dinner, she led me and my grandparents to the hallway closet. One by one, she pulled out the garments she’d been working on in her shop near the Miami River, the garments she thought of as works of art. Among them, I recall, was the kimono adorned with butterfly wings.

  I watched the faces of her elderly, southern Presbyterian parents. My mother’s mother touched the fabrics and said, “Oh, look at this,” and “How about that.” And she appreciated, in a reserved though generous manner, her daughter’s workmanship with needle and thread. But what, exactly, had my mother made with needle and thread? This wasn’t clear to me or to my grandparents, who were, frankly, distraught. They didn’t know what to say to their daughter.

  After a long moment, we retreated from the closet in the hallway. We went to the living room and sat. The television was tuned to the Tony Awards. My mother had always loved Broadway musicals. After a while, I looked away from the screen and saw, on my mother’s face and in her slumped posture, in the way she blew cigarette smoke forcibly from her mouth, her angry disappointment.

  Had she pulled out hangers draped with clothing that showed either an ironic exaggeration or a direct repudiation of contemporary fashion ideals — glamorously deglamorized dresses in the mid-nineties Comme des Garçons mode, for instance, or radical versions of men’s suits executed as statements to be worn by women — her parents might have been similarly perplexed and anxious. But I would have understood that she was making something that, however odd her choices might have appeared at first glance, could nevertheless be worn in the world in a way that communicated to the viewer, in a relatively direct manner, aspects of her desires and her attitudes about the body, about shape and form, about seduction and the politics of public life. I understand that a comparison between my mother’s clothes and European and American runway designs is not entirely fair. I also realize that her parents and her son were not the perfect audience for her fantastic productions.

  She showed us her work. We fled. She risked our misunderstanding and disapprobation, our attempts at praise, our confusion and neglect. In this risk and its result — her suffering — she found proof of herself as an original and subversive artist.

  Was it so? Was my mother ahead of her time, destined for acceptance by some future civilization, as she proclaimed more than once in the years leading up to her death?

  The robe is titled “The Heroine’s Journey,” and yet it is neutral in relation to the wearer’s sexuality. It does not shape itself around the body, and it does not impose shape on the body. From a distance, it looks like a vestment worn by an Episcopal priest; though, with its tassels and wings, it is clearly more pagan than Protestant. It is a peaceable kingdom crowded with personal spirit guides and pets — birds, lion, horse, giraffe, cat — a menagerie of wild and tame hieroglyphs guiding the kimono’s wearer, the heroine, safely down the green road bordered with flowers and paved with magical coins. The robe takes on the life of all the lives emblazoned on or suspended from it, and it imparts this life to the person wearing it. But what manner of life is it? Neither earthbound nor confined within the mortal body, it is a life that is at once sacred and secular, shapeless and formal, youthful and aged, innocent and experienced, ancient and modern, fleeting and everlasting.

  The year before she died, I met my mother in Philadelphia. It was the spring of 1999. Her father had been dead for four years, and her mother was soon to follow. Not long after her father’s passing, my mother had abandoned Miami and her air-conditioned shop beneath the expressway overpasses. She’d packed up her sewing machines, her tailor’s dummies, her buttons, her worktable, her fabrics and scissors, her pincushions and measuring tapes, and Merlin, her new cat — the white one had finally given up the ghost — and, using money left by my grandfather, she’d purchased a little one-story house at the bottom of a road in Black Mountain. Now, three years later, she’d driven north to attend the art school graduation of F., a friend from the Florida years who had left Miami to study painting in Philadelphia. At the ceremony, F. and my mother met a gallery owner who worked in the Old City district. This person expressed interest in my mother’s clothes, and my mother formed the impression that the gallery would give her a show.

  One Saturday morning in May, I got on a train to Philadelphia. F. lived in a red brick house on a quiet Center City street. I took my time walking from the station. I had a bad feeling about the day ahead. My mother’s health had been rapidly declining in recent years, and in the past months she’d sounded, when I’d spoken with her on the phone, sicker and sicker. I was afraid of what I was going to see.

  I wasn’t wrong to worry. When I saw my mother, I wanted nothing more than to lower my head, turn away, and walk steadily and without stopping back to the station.

  Instead, she and F. and I went out to a cafe. I did my best to suppress my embarrassment at my mother’s loud speaking voice. It seemed to me that she was trumpeting and boasting. Were people staring? I recall that F. was wearing a jacket my mother had made, a short coat decorated with contrasting fabric pieces stitched in geometric patterns. F. wore the garment comfortably. If the embellished kimono represented couture, the jacket might have come from the Peace Goods sportswear line. I wondered, as I sat with my coffee, whether F. would continue wearing it once my mother got in her car and headed south.

  We paid the check, got up from the table, and began our pilgrimage to the gallery where my mother hoped to be welcomed as a new artist. It was a long journey over a short distance. I watched my mother struggling to breathe; and I noticed her preparing to reach for the nearest fixed object, a lamppost or a parking meter that could steady her, if she suddenly needed it. Had she gained weight? Lost weight? What about the cough? Had her hacking grown worse? Why did her hair look so dead? Was she having trouble carrying her portfolio? And where had she got to all of a sudden?

  “Mom? Mom?”

  There she was, half a block behind, standing in the heat, lighting a cigarette with a shaking hand, looking lost.

  “Mom, are you all right? Do you want to rest a minute?”

  “No. I’m fine. I don’t need to rest. Let’s get to the gallery. How far is it, Don?”

  “It’s not far. It’s up here. Can you make it? Do you want me to carry your portfolio?”

  “No.”

  “Have you seen a doctor, Mom?”

  “I have a doctor at home, Don. Let’s get to the gallery. They’re expecting me. I have an appointment.”

  But what kind of appointment? When we finally got down the block and through the door, the woman behind the front desk recommended that my mother leave slides and a resume and wait to be contacted. This is normal-enough procedure, but my mother, who had garrulously promoted the narrative of her imminent ascension, took it as a blow. She stood before the receptionist’s desk. I was terrified that she would make a scene. I felt her anger and her humiliation, and my own humi
liation. I paced around the gallery space, then sneaked out and paced some more, back and forth, on the sidewalk. It was a while before my mother and F. came outside. F. encouraged my mother not to get upset. But my mother had tipped into one of her bitter, bewildered moods.

  The walk to F.’s house was only a few blocks. Nevertheless, it was too much to ask of my mother, so we hailed a taxi. When we got to F.’s, we decided to have an early supper. There was leftover fried chicken in the refrigerator, and we could eat outside. F.’s street was a dead end and got little traffic; the residents used the street and the sidewalk as a kind of communal square, and they occasionally set up chairs and tables beneath the old trees that formed a low canopy overhead.

  It was evening, and the air was warm and still. The three of us sat in a circle, eating with our hands. For years, my mother had had the habit, in public and in private, of announcing, as an artist, her identification with me. She believed that we understood each other, and were fundamentally alike in our alienation from the noncreative world. “We don’t need to worry about what other people think, Don,” she might say. And she might add, “We don’t fit in.”

  My mother may have made a few such claims that night when she, F., and I sat down to dinner. I don’t remember. All I could do was watch her eat.

  She sat facing me. She took large bites, and bits of food spilled down her front as she chewed. She ate, it seemed to me, without awareness of herself; and the impression she gave was of something gone wrong, as if perhaps, at age sixty-four, she were making her first attempt to learn table skills. She wasn’t a toddler, though; she was sick, and denying her sickness. In four months, she would learn that she was dying.

  I looked away. I was a man in his forties, afraid of his mother. Or maybe I was afraid for her. I looked again, and we made eye contact, and it crossed my mind that she was a crazy person wearing crazy clothes of her own crazy design, with a crazy person’s hairdo atop a head brimming with strange hallucinations in which she conversed with a crew of spirits that included the Virgin Mary and Jesus himself. These spirits related to her as a peer. The fact of their communications reinforced her belief in herself as spiritually and emotionally superevolved, and this belief, in turn, supported her image of herself as a heroine on a journey. In this romantic-journey scenario, her failures and losses in life were grand successes, insofar as they represented trials too arduous for anyone but a hero to overcome.